30 August 2016

30th of August

Other farm news
The two machines with the mATX motherboards have now been transplanted from mATX cases into ATX cases which allows for a 2nd GPU to be installed later. If the rumours are correct Nvidia is expected to announce availability of the GTX 1050 in September.

The weather has warmed up so I am now running machines overnight even though winter hasn't officially ended.

Some of the Intel GPU machines have been running Weather at Home 2 climate models which have been taking as long as 220 hours depending on the region that the work unit covers. I still have a few left to complete before I can apply updates to the machines. CPDN work units usually don't like being interrupted so I try and finish off any that are running before applying updates.

Einstein Intel OpenCL testing
Einstein got some information from Intel regarding their OpenCL not working and have adjusted some tolerances in their validator. Intel were saying that their implementation of fused multiply-add instructions were more accurate than before.

I ran a batch of OpenCL tasks on two machines using the Intel GPU with mixed results. Some work unit types (BRP4) mostly validated and some (BRP6) all failed to validate. The BRP6's were taking around 8 hours each work unit to process. One of the machines fetched way too much work which I ended up having to abort after a few days of running in high priority mode.

Farm configuration
The Intel GPU part of the farm consist of 8 machines with i7-6700 CPU's and HD Graphics 530 built-in.

There are 4 Nvidia GPU machines. Two of them have i7-5820K CPU's with a pair of GTX750Ti cards. The other two have i3-6100T CPU's with a single GTX970 each.